Alexa : Worthless & Easy to Manipulate?

[Biff_Tiberius_Farnsworth]

I've posted about lots of people gaming their Alexa ratings but I've never revealed how. Now someone else has

Alexa : Worthless & Easy to Manipulate?

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3847

[TrustNo1]

Alexa easy to manipulate? I would put that in the big duh column. Anytime I hear people talk about their Alexa ratings, newbie pops into my mind.

[Biff_Tiberius_Farnsworth]

Yeah, it's funny how many people put a lot of creedance in Alexa rankings.

For example Ad-Brite's pricing structure relies heavily on Alexa rankings.

~B

[neweconomy]

Facinating... but what's the incentive to cheat it?

Alexa ISN'T really accurate... internet marketing websites have far too high of rankings because a disproportionate amount of their users have alexa.

But useless?

I don't know...

I feel like it has a purpose in judging traffic trends, comparing your site to another, and looking at the relative success of a website... because while you CAN pay $300 a month to get your alexa up, very few people do.

[mojojuju]

It's easy to get your alexa ranking up.

I was about to do some design work on a client's website when I thought It would be a good Idea to get an estimate of what kind of traffic their site receives.

So, using a counter script which is hosted on my domain, I put my tracking code on each page of their site so I could study their traffic for about a week.

The result was that the alexa ranking for the domain which hosted the tracking code falsely increased dramatically.

[Biff_Tiberius_Farnsworth]

Salutations and Welcome Mojo

I enjoy your postings on Harvey's board.

~B

[mojojuju]

Thank you Biff

[kiki]

Welcome to ewealth mojo

[D.W]

Yes, Alexia is rather easy to falsify. What’s just as easy is manipulating Google page rank as well. Now Google won’t index sites that are spoofing, but the people who are doing it just want high PR links before they stop.

Once they get the links they want, they stop, then get indexed. So if you get a large number of link request right after big “G” updates, make sure you check to see if they’re actually indexed.

I've caught people brave enough to offer these high PR links for sale... Of course that's fraud. But some people will do anything to make a buck.

[nebula1]

The cool thing is that alot of the people who want to give me or you guys money demand that alexa rating, so giving it to them only helps me close the deal If I was going to buy a website I wouldn't look at the Alexa rating -I'll tell you that...I would look at how consistent the sales or income stream was for the last year and weary of sites that only have one affiliate etc.